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For additional information and context, read the accompanying article by David Sheen:https://electronicintifada.net/conten...
How an Israeli colonel invented the burned babies lie to justify genocide
David SheenThe Electronic Intifada11 June 2024
Atrocities against babies that the head of the Israeli army’s national rescue unit alleged were committed by Hamas fighters when they attacked an Israeli kibbutz on 7 October were in fact lurid tales of the officer’s own invention, intended to provide a pretext for genocide in the Gaza Strip, and to protect the massacre’s actual perpetrators: Israel’s own soldiers, acting on the orders of a top general.As Israeli forces recaptured territories temporarily taken by Hamas earlier that day, the commander of the national rescue unit of the Israeli army’s Home Front Command Colonel Golan Vach led the recovery of corpses from the region, which spanned an area of hundreds of square kilometers. A week later, Vach began asserting that Hamas fighters had brutally executed “eight babies” in a single house in Kibbutz Be’eri.
“They were concentrated there and they killed them and they burned them,” Vach told a throng of reporters on 14 October, pointing through a smashed window into the charred living room of kibbutz resident Pessi Cohen.
According to the only two captives who survived the bloodbath, however, a total of 13 civilians died at Cohen’s home, including Cohen herself, and none were babies or toddlers.
All of them were middle-aged or older, save for adolescent twins taken captive from next door.
None of the 13 civilians killed were executed and only one of them was certainly killed by Hamas fighters who conquered the kibbutz house by house on the morning of 7 October, the survivors say. The remaining 12 were killed hours later during Israel’s counteroffensive to reconquer the territory.
After heated exchanges over the phone with the commander of a Qassam fighting force of dozens dug in at the Cohen home in Be’eri, Israeli police arrived at the home in the middle of the afternoon with guns blazing.
At least two captives were killed in the hours of crossfire that ensued, but many if not all of the remaining 10 captives, along with all the remaining Qassam fighters, were killed in the final stroke of the battle, either incinerated to death or torn up from the shrapnel caused by two tank shells Israeli forces fired directly at the house.
Israel kills its own: the Hannibal directive
A December investigation by Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth revealed that Israel implemented against its own civilians captured on 7 October a version of its Hannibal directive: Israel used overwhelming lethal force even at the risk of killing Israelis along with their Palestinian captors, in order to avoid leaving them alive to be held captive in Gaza, and to avoid having to pay a steep political price for their return.
Although Israel’s application of the Hannibal directive was widespread on 7 October, its implementation at the Cohen home stands out because more captives were killed there than in any other single structure on that day. One high-ranking Israeli officer called the army’s actions there an “exponential Hannibal.”
And unlike other Israeli captives who were killed en route to Gaza, these 12 civilians were still at Be’eri, kilometers away from the Strip, and just a few hundred meters away from the kibbutz gate, where hundreds of heavily armed Israeli soldiers were then encamped, waiting for orders.
In February, following campaigning by relatives of the civilians killed at the Cohen home, the Israeli army opened an investigation into the incident, and the demolition of the house was postponed for the duration of the probe.
A relative of three of the civilians Israel incinerated by tank shell inside the Cohen house – 12-year old Hatsroni twins Yanai and Liel and their 73-year-old great-aunt and guardian Ayala – complained to Israel’s national broadcaster Kan that Israel’s actions on the battlefield were a failure from a cost-benefit analysis.
“I am willing to pay a price: that we will kill our civilians in exchange for something else,” Omri Shifroni told Kan. “But what is the something else? To advance quickly? Why? Why?! Did we with certainty save anyone by shooting a shell here?”
The army denied in March that its officers knowingly killed captives at the Cohen house. “Any attempt to castigate and blame IDF soldiers and commanders as if they purposefully harmed civilians is mistaken and absolutely baseless,” it told Israeli broadcaster Kan.
But in late December the ranking officer who led Israel’s reconquest of the kibbutz – 99th Infantry Division commander and then commander-in-waiting of the Gaza Division, Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram – admitted to The New York Times that he ordered an Israeli tank to fire shells at the house, though he knew there were still-living Israeli captives inside. “Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties,” Hiram recalled ordering the tank commander.
The revelation that Hiram’s orders on the battlefield ended the lives of Israeli civilians stirred outrage amongst some secular Israelis. “The set of values of messianists and fascists – who apparently prefer the land and killing the enemy over the sanctity of life – is creeping into the army. It is worrisome and doubly disturbing when our hostages are still being held in the Gaza Strip,” wrote Israeli activist Nava Rozolyo on X, formerly known as Twitter.
This criticism in turn triggered a wave of widespread support for Hiram and his application of the Hannibal directive on Israeli civilians in double digits.
“Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram, and all religious Zionists, are accused of preferring land and killing the enemy over the sanctity of life,” wrote West Bank settler council chair Shlomo Neeman in Israeli magazine BeSheva. “Is land more important than life? Yes. Land is more important than life.”
“The love of these patches of land is inscribed in the heart of the entire Jewish people,” Neeman wrote. “This is not a value of ‘a son of Religious Zionism,’ it is a value for sons of Zionism, as it is for the overwhelming majority of the Jews in this land.”
Hiram went on to command some of Israel’s invasion forces that since 8 October have killed more than 36,000 Palestinian civilians, wounded over 80,000 more, and destroyed every facet of life in the Gaza Strip, including hospitals, bakeries, mosques, schools and universities.
Gaza’s al-Israa University, the Strip’s last standing institute of higher learning, was plundered of its historical treasures, used for months as a position from which to snipe at passing Palestinian civilians, and then in January blown up entirely on Hiram’s orders.
Hiram was later censured for breaking the army chain of command and ordering the demolition without the explicit advance approval of his superior, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman. “If you had submitted the request to collapse the university for my approval, I would have approved it,” said Finkelman, head of Israel’s Southern Command, according to Israel army radio.
If Hiram’s rise in the ranks is impeded over these incidents, he will likely still be rewarded, not punished, for the decisions he has made on the battlefield. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already interviewed Hiram to be his next military secretary, Israeli daily Haaretzreported in March.
Whatever Hiram’s fate, it is unlikely that the Israeli army will either fully endorse his explanations of the “mass Hannibal” incident at Pessi Cohen’s house, or reveal all it knows about what really happened there on 7 October, because to do so would force it to undercut a pillar of Israeli propaganda about the events of that day: that Hamas heartlessly executed Israeli babies – a lie promoted by Hiram, but first invented by the commander of the Israeli army’s home front national rescue unit, Colonel Golan Vach.
